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This Saturday I will be having a trunk show in a wonderful Facebook group called Artisans Create Together. This group has been a great resource for finding out about jewelry designers and component makers that I’d not known about before. They’ve also featured old favorites of mine, as well. The primary purpose of the group is to get to know various jewelry artists, but they do have trunk shows too. I was the featured artist on Wednesday and the info about me is still on the page. The founder of the group, Janice Everett of J-Lynn Jewels, shared info and photos about my studio spaces, my family and home, as well as my creative journey.

Saturday’s Trunk Show will feature my ceramic jewelry components and my finished jewelry as well as work by Dana Phillips. Here are some sneak peek at some of my offerings.

Myself and around 160 other artists will be showing their creative works here this Thursday, from 10:00 – 3:00. We have visual artists, plus performing artists and literary artists.I will be selling my finished jewelry, although, if you are interested in my ceramic components, just let me know. I’d be happy to bring them too. So much talent here. Hope you can come!

I was inspired, although I didn’t play by the rules exactly. The necklace I designed is beachy and turquoise. I even included a starfish, however the necklace doesn’t have the neutral colors that Sherry included in her pretty color palette. My necklace just didn’t seem to want to develop in that direction.

I’m still inspired by Sherri’s color palette though and I’d like to make some additional pieces of jewelry that adhere more closely to her colors. I made some ceramic clam shell pendants this weekend. I bisque fired them on Sunday, but they haven’t been glazed yet. Perhaps I’ll use one of the clam shells to design a necklace in tan, ecru, turquoise and teal.

We’ve been in our new home for a month now. It’s smaller than our old house, but very nice. We’ve unpacked all our boxes, and put nearly everything away. Tomorrow I plan to haul all the cardboard boxes back to the moving company so someone else can reuse them. It still doesn’t seem like home yet. I wonder how long that will take? It feels kind of like we’re house sitting someone else’s place.

I promised you a studio tour and a giveaway. The studio tour comes first. Hang on till the end and you’ll find out how to enter the giveaway for a free artisan bracelet!

My studio isn’t 100% moved into yet. There are a few small boxes on the floor, the closet is a mess and not all the pictures have been hung. But I decided not to wait any longer to share some pictures. I can always do an update later.

We’ll start at the door of the studio. See that guy there? He just sort of followed me to this new house, helped me install a whole wall of shelving and even gave me the “Jeweler Parking Only” sign. I think he’s a keeper.😉

To the right of the door are some IKEA spice racks that are the perfect size for my ceramic glazes. The white box on the far right is a photo cube, which helps diffuse light and reduce shadows on my jewelry photographs. Next to the photo cube is my desk. I didn’t take any pictures of it, because it’s become the surface on which I’ve laid all the stuff I’ve unpacked, but haven’t found a space for yet.

Here’s a closer view of the “spice racks”. Small bottles fit two deep and pint jars fit nicely, too.

My orchids are happy in their new home on my studio window sill.

The next picture is the best part of the new studio. As I mentioned in my last post, we took most of the shelving that had been in our previous living room and moved it into my new studio. It is a dream come true to have a place for all my metalsmithing equipment, polymer clay supplies, enameling, beading and ceramic supplies. It’s not a big room, but the wall of shelves makes it all possible!

The wooden boxes are from IKEA, as are the shelving units. I keep all my beads, except my art beads, in these boxes, sorted by color. The white, plastic 5 drawer units hold all my metal supplies, such as brass beads, copper wire, silver chain, etc. The other shelf of plastic units holds some of my clay supplies. The wooden earring rack was made by Kristi Bowman’s husband. It folds up flat and is super handy to bring to shows.

The last picture shows the wall behind the door, where I hung up some certificates of appreciation from my 30 teaching career The wall looked kind of bare, so I also hung up a fused glass wall hanging and a collage with lovely calligraphy about the value of friends. Both these are handmade. Just around the corner, to the left, is a handmade ceramic wall vase by Marsha Neal Minutella.So now you’ve had the tour and it is time for the giveaway. I’m thinking of this as a kind of reverse house-warming gift. Lots of neighborhood people brought us gifts when we moved in, so now I’m turning the tables and giving this bracelet away, as a gift, in celebration of our new home and this new chapter in our lives.

The focal bead is handmade lampwork by Paradise Beads. The tab shaped purple flower bead is by Sue Beads and is also lampwork glass. The lilac colored bead is handmade ceramic by White Clover Kiln. There are also a sprinkling of top-drilled pearls, 2 Lepidolite beads and Czech glass bird beads.

Here’s how to be entered for my house-warming giveaway:

You can get one entry for commenting on this post.

You can get one additional entry each time you share this post on your choice of social media. After you’ve shared, come back here and enter where you shared it and a link to it. Make a separate comment each time you share. If you list multiple shares in one comment, it will only count as one.

Please include contact info, so I can easily let you know if you won. If I can’t connect with you without having to search for contact info, I will skip on to the next entry.

The big day finally arrived. Everything in the old house was finally packed up.

We’d labeled all the boxes with which room they should go to. Then we labeled the rooms in the new house, so the movers would know where to place things. There’s my studio on the right.

And here comes the furniture. The men are moving my beloved printers cabinet into my studio and I am hovering around making sure that they baby it, (They did. They were awesome).

Carefully putting the cabinet in place.

My studio at the end of the day. Lots of work still to be done!

If you look at the second picture in this post, you’ll see an empty bookshelf. We had many of these shelving units in our old living room, because we’re both avid readers. However our new, much smaller living room will only hold one tall bookshelf and one that is half that tall. So we donated probably two thirds of our books to the library and then placed all the extra bookshelves in my studio! I had long dreamed of having a whole wall of shelves to contain all my supplies!

On the second day in the new house we started re-assembling the shelves in my studio. You can see that one tall bookshelf is already in place and one short shelf unit has been assembled. A screw driver lies atop the shelf, ready for assembling the remaining shelves. Altogether, I now have 3 tall units and 2 short ones. A dream come true!

Here’s what the other side of the studio looked like at that point.

More progress has been made over the past week, but I’m not quite ready to show it off yet. Perhaps I’ll turn the tables on the idea of a house warming gift. Instead, I think that I’ll have a giveaway with my next blog post. We could have 2 winners. One person could win a pair of earrings and one person could win a ceramic pendant. What do you think? I’ll mull over this idea (which just now occurred to me!) a bit and see what I can come up with before my next post. Stay tuned!

This week we’re closing one chapter of our lives and moving on to the next. As long as I can remember I’d dreamed of having a house in the woods. We made that dream come true 11 years ago and it has been wonderful.

Forest visitor.

However, as the years have passed, the yard and large house have become more difficult to keep up with. So after much thought, we are downsizing and moving to a retirement community that is only about 20 minutes away from our current home.

We will start schlepping some of the smaller items over to our new house on Thursday and the moving van will finish the task on Friday!

Our current house is all packed up and we’re practically camping here. Well that’s a bit of an overstatement, however everything but the bare essentials is in boxes.

I left some glazes out and may have some time before before Thursday to glaze some bisqueware. Fingers crossed. I have missed doing anything creative for the past few weeks. Taping together packing boxes just doesn’t fit the bill, I’m afraid!

So, would you like to go on a tour of the new house! It will never again look this clean!!! A bit of a disclaimer: I have a bit of a wide angle lens on my camera which makes everything look bigger than it really is. This is the living room and the dining area is on the right.

The next two pictures show my studio from two different angles. It’s a bit smaller than my current space, but not much.

The open door leads to the hall. The master bedroom is to the right, the kitchen/living room/dinning area is to the left.

Here’s our new kitchen. The house itself isn’t new, but it was completely redone on the inside and we got to choose all the surface treatments, lights etc.

I’m sad to leave my home in the woods, but I am looking forward to the many new opportunities that will be available to us, because of this move. I’ll be writing more about that in the weeks to come, (hint: the retirement community has an amazing, full ceramics studio!)